[ QUOTE ]
Now, now...they're all equally worthless if your only motivation for going to school is to get an airline job.
If you're going to school to learn, however, a degree in philosophy is worth just as much as a pre-med degree or an aviation degree!!
Stop getting so defensive, everyone!!!
[/ QUOTE ]
Actually we were just kidding...sorry. Need more
s
Though actually, I work in higher ed and do have what is generally considered to be the most useless of all degrees, a Liberal Arts Degree (the classes I took broke down into a double major in Phil and Math with a Minor in Theology--or something like that).
I can make a strong case for the "true" liberal arts (as opposed to the courses underwater basket weaving, feminist poetry of the middle ages in sub-saharan Africa, and the like (or I should say, the vastly unlike) that are included under the ubiquitous title of liberal arts at most schools.)
This case can be summed up very succinctly in something Robert Maynard Hutchins (he was the president of the University of Chicago) once said:
“The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
“The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.”
And you ask, why is this important? I think a lot of pilots that are disgruntled have not thought about this. Those guys who said "I want it NOW and I'll take whatever shortcut I can to attain the nirvana of airline pilot." They forget that they are men first, and pilots somewhere else down the line--and as such they need to be educated. The thought that: once I become a flight instructor [regional FO, regional CA, corp pilot, major airline FO, major airline CA, 747-400 CA, what have you] I will be happy--that is my calling in life; is a thought that is only to lead one ultimately to frustration and disappointment.
